Why Nothing Works” Calls for Centralized Government Power

Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back, by Marc J. Dunkelman (PublicAffairs, 416 pp., $27)

In 1909, Herbert Croly, an intellectual leader of the progressive movement and co-founder of The New Republic, published The Promise of American Life. To address the challenges of urbanization and industrialization, Croly argued that America needed to move beyond the decentralized government championed by Thomas Jefferson and adopt Alexander Hamilton’s vision of concentrated power in the national government.

Into this two-century-old dialectic steps Marc J. Dunkelman, a former Democratic Party operative and now Brown University fellow, whose provocative new book, Why Nothing Works, argues that progressives themselves bear responsibility for the governmental sclerosis afflicting modern America. Dunkelman frames his thesis as a continuation of Croly’s claim that the nation needs to adopt “Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends”—centralizing power to serve democratic purposes.

According to Dunkelman, early-twentieth-century progressives initially embraced this approach, which reached its apotheosis in Robert Moses’s imperious transformation of New York. The story pivots in the 1960s, when a “Jeffersonian reaction” against perceived government overreach led progressives to shift focus—championing individual rights and procedural safeguards that effectively shackled the state. Dunkelman argues that progressives “abandoned efforts to draw power into the hands of power brokers and worked instead to diffuse authority—to push it down and out.”

The result, he claims, is our current predicament: a nominally powerful government immobilized by a thicket of court orders, regulatory rules, local authorities, and special interest demands. Indeed, across the country, major infrastructure projects are plagued by delays and cost overruns—think of the Second Avenue Subway or high-speed rail in California—when they are undertaken at all. Trust in government has plummeted and public frustration mounted.

In response to the malaise, Dunkelman calls for a neo-Hamiltonianism that could enable government to push through big projects in transportation, housing, and other policy areas. To his credit, he forthrightly accepts the tradeoffs. If the state can make it easier for clean-energy firms to build transmission lines or for developers to erect more affordable housing, it can also make it easier to build coal-fired power plants or to gentrify urban neighborhoods. It’s a risk he’s willing to take. His message: do something, even if it is wrong.

Dunkelman’s rich historical narrative traces progressivism from its Hamiltonian early days regulating railroads and busting trusts through its Jeffersonian reaction. The latter, he argues, has paralyzed housing construction, infrastructure development, and environmental progress.

Yet for all its strengths, the book’s prescriptions are rather vague. Dunkelman’s primary recommendation—that we must centralize government power to make “hard, expensive, painful, inconvenient, and often politically unpalatable choices”—raises the question of which choices, specifically, and who should make them. This lack of specificity weakens his argument.

Further, his framework suffers from a curiously insular focus on progressivism’s internal contradictions. Conservatives are strikingly absent from the narrative, creating a distorted impression that all meaningful political action occurs within the Left’s ideological borders. This schema overlooks significant counterexamples—Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, bipartisan welfare-state expansions, and the still operative military-industrial complex—that complicate Dunkelman’s thesis. He also fails to note that the Reagan administration concentrated power in the executive branch.

The book also gives short shrift to the fundamental tension in advocating for concentrated governmental power in a polarized democracy: What happens when that power falls into the hands of those with whom progressives disagree? The current Trump administration provides a sobering test case that Dunkelman never adequately addresses. (In fairness, he wrote the book before Trump was elected to his second term.)

Even Dunkelman’s fellow progressives are likely to have strong reservations about his proposal. Progressives often call for bigger government to protect the vulnerable but in the next breath say that government is controlled by billionaires or a tool of the patriarchy. That’s a tough circle to square.

Finally, Dunkelman ignores several important barriers to administrative centralization. For example, despite voluminous research finding that public-sector unions drive up government costs and undermine managerial authority, Dunkelman almost never mentions such unions. He also mostly ignores urban political machines that progressives dominate. Presumably, Dunkelman wants government to work in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, where schools languish, little housing is built, and infrastructure projects run massively over budget. Someone is benefiting from this status quo.

Still, Dunkelman has produced a thought-provoking contribution to the growing consensus that American government is too sclerotic. His central insight—that the diffuse allocation of political power has crippled America’s capacity to build and adapt—resonates across ideological lines. In an era of crumbling infrastructure and housing shortages, Hamilton’s vision of energetic government holds appeal.

Whether progressives—or any political faction—can resolve the tension between empowering government and constraining potential abuses remains an open question. A government powerful enough to “control the governed” and at the same time “control itself” was the greatest challenge to republican government laid out in Federalist #51. Dunkelman offers no easy answers, but he articulates the dilemma with admirable clarity. That makes Why Nothing Works worthy of attention.

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